Estudios de Argentina Televisora Color (ATC), Sección. Summa Nº117, 1977, p. 95.
ARCHITECTURE AS DEVELOPMENT INFRASTRUCTURE
The idea of development intended to accelerate the processes and bring the results closer in time. Although it is difficult to clearly date its beginning, it is easier to identify its peak - from the end of the 50s and during the 60s - as well as verify its abrupt slowdown with the first global oil crisis of August 1973, which placed Latin American countries in the consciousness of hopelessness. Development was the catalyzer for a few chimeric projects that architects had brought to consideration of society some years before, and which were assumed as the guides for the new design ideas. In them, a series of instrumental conceptions of architecture now acquired definite value, to operate during the expansive process of development: the value of the supporting structure in the definition of large-scale projects; the spatial generation through elements -blocks, ceilings, base platforms- able to maintain a certain indifference to the specificity of the program, and the conception of the project with discrete parts for a greater constructive effectiveness. With them, but also beyond them, architecture was promoted as an urban conception. Architecture should be able to assume the dimension of the city itself in several ways: the sense of its size, surpassing the scales of the plot and the block; the sense of its circulation-oriented dynamics, however prepared to deal with flexibility and spontaneity of multiple activities; the sense of its own construction and the sense of representation as a collective entity inherent in its own materialization and scale. Regarding superblocks and megastructures, Alan Colquhoun had said they have a capacity to be, at the same time, more and less than a building 18 . The design of the new studios for Argentina Televisora Color (ATC) developed by Justo Solsona, Flora Manteola, Javier Sánchez Gómez, Josefina Santos and Rafael Viñoly between 1977 and 1978, had to respond to technical and functional specificities, deserving an approach like the one required for an industrial complex 19 . Although it was necessary to accommodate spaces of wide- ranging heights, such as workshops, studios and offices, the concept did not deny the possibility of a regular organization on the ground floor, covered on a homogeneous grid of 7.20 m by side fixed by the concrete columns, which seems to precede all subsequent differentiations. The disparity between the 9m height required for the workshops and the 3m for the offices was the key to configure the roof as a single inclined plane, which descends to reach the ground. Over the large concrete slab of constant slope, from which the four closed volumes of the studios emerge with 15m height, a public square is accessible from the level of the street. Partially buried under the square, in some opaque way, the architecture of ATC was closer to the idea of urban infrastructure than to the conventional notion of a building.
In the ATC building, the key element of the entire operation was the ground platform, as the inclined plane under which the full variation of the programmatic organization is conceived. Not surprisingly, one of the possible definitions of infrastructure is that which refers to the underground structures that serve as supporting base for others. The notion of a system or set of material components, which not only make feasible the functioning of something but are also able to organize and control the position and behavior of other systems and components without necessarily being seen, has always been associated with the word infrastructure. In ATC, the concept becomes evident almost in a negative sense. This work can also represent paradigmatically the closing of the structuralist thought cycle in the relationship between modern architecture and the city in Argentina. A cycle that had fully relied on the ability of architecture to become an urban infrastructure, as the bearer of the encouraging meanings of the future.
(*) Autores Authors:
Horacio Torrent Schneider (Pergamino, 1959) es arquitecto de la UNR, Argentina (1985), magíster en Arquitectura PUC (2001) y doctor en Arquitectura UNR (2006). Es profesor titular de la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Estudios Urbanos de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile y presidente de Docomomo Chile. (Pergamino, 1959) is architect of UNR, Argentina (1985), master in Architecture PUC (2001) and PhD in Architecture UNR (2006). Professor at the School of Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Studies of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and president of Docomomo Chile.
Cláudia Costa Cabral (Porto Alegre, 1959) es arquitecta de la Universidad Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, doctora en Arquitectura por la Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona, profesora asociada del Departamento de Arquitectura, Universidad Federal de Rio Grande do Sul y coordinadora del programa de postgrado en Arquitectura de esta casa de estudios. (Porto Alegre, 1959) is architect at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Ph.D. in architecture from the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura in Barcelona, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and coordinator of the postgraduate program in architecture at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.
1 1 University City of Tucumán. Nuestra arquitectura Nº 254, September 1950, Buenos Aires. 2 The architects in charge of the studies were: Horacio Caminos, Eduardo Catalano, Diego Diaz Puertas, José A. Le Pera, José Liebich, Carlos Marfort, Rafael Onetto, Carmen Pages, Carlos Robledo, Eduardo Sacriste, Enrico Tedeschi, Jorge Vivanco, Hilario Zalba, in addition to engineers María Carmen Agostini, Salvador Clabria, Carlos Laucher and Guido Oberti. 3 Amancio Williams. Office Building for Buenos Aires. La Arquitectura de hoy Nº 1, January 1947, Buenos Aires, p. 78. 4 O.V.R.A. Studies Of The Contemporary Problems For The Organization Of Integral Housing In The Argentine Republic. Cuaderno 1. Buenos Aires, 1943. 5 See Argentina II: Torrent, Horacio. “Urban architectures, modern synthesis. “The dialectics between the form of the city and the autonomy of the block “, AOA Magazine nº 35, 2017, Santiago, p. 18.
6 See: Williams, Claudio. Amancio Williams: obras y textos. First edition. Buenos Aires: Donn, 2008. P. 71. 7 WillIams, Amancio. Pizzetti, Julio. “Una nueva unidad estructural”. Revista Nueva Visión Nº 5, 1954, pp. 32-35. 8 Banham, Reyner. Megaestructuras: futuro urbano del pasado reciente. Gustavo Gili S.A. Barcelona 1978, p. 11. 9 Testa, Clorindo. “Casa de Gobierno de La Pampa”, Summa Nº 2, October 1963, pp. 1-2. 39-49. 10 Osvaldo Bidinost, Jorge Chute, José Gassó, Mabel Lapacó, Martín Meyer. “Escuela Superior Manuel Belgrano, Córdoba”, Summa, N° 17, June 1969. Buenos Aires, p. 41. 11 Raúl R. Rivarola, Mario F. Soto, architects. Escuela Normal N° 1, Leandro N. Alem, Prov. of Misiones. Summa N° 17, Junio 1969, Buenos Aires, p. 36. 12 Llauró, Urgell, and associates. San Vicente de Paul Hospital, Oran, Province of Salta, Argentina, 1969. Summa N° 39/40, July/August 1971. Buenos Aires, pp. 70-73. 13 Mario Roberto Álvarez y Asociados. Somisa (1966) Integración de arquitectura e ingeniería. Summa Nº 80/81, September 1974, pp. 9-11. 135-141. 14 Bullrich, Francisco. Nuevos Caminos de la arquitectura Latinoamericana. Blume, Barcelona, 1969, p. 49. 15 Manteola, F.; Petchersky, I; Sánchez Gómez, J.; Santos, J.; Solsona, J.; Vinoly, R. Rioja Housing Complex, Federal Capital, Summa Nº 76, May 1974, pp. 22-31. 16 Solsona, Justo. De la ciudad de la trama a la ciudad de las torres (1997). In: Justo Solsona, Hacer y Decir. Compilación, edición, notas y prólogo de Vivian Acuña. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Infinito, 2007, p. 182.
17 67 Aluar, Puerto Madryn, Province of Chubut, 1974. Manteola, Sanchez Gomez, Santos, Solsona, Vinoly. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, p. 97. 18 Colquhoun, Alan. The superblock (1971) Essays in Architectural Criticism. Modern Architecture and Historical Change, The Mit Press, Cambridge, 1981, p. 98. 19 Centro de Producción Buenos Aires, Summa Nº 117, October 1977, pp. 91-98.
35
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker